


No Pets Allowed

by Cinnamon_Anemone



Series: Tony Stark Bingo (2019-2020) [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, They Followed Me Home, Tony Stark Has A Heart, accidental pet fic, can I keep them mom?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 09:31:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20468828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamon_Anemone/pseuds/Cinnamon_Anemone
Summary: Tony Stark is not a cat person.





	1. Don't we have a rule about this?

**Author's Note:**

> This fulfills my A1: Adopting A Pet square for the 2019 Tony Stark Bingo!
> 
> Thanks to my cheer-readers, and to NemesisToMyself and justanotherpipedream for Beta-ing!
> 
> Minor warning for non-graphic mention of off-screen animal death.

Tony needs more coffee.

He's fifty hours into a lab binge, which means he only has ten more hours before JARVIS’s Go-The-Fuck-To-Sleep protocols activate, but he’s really hit a stride and he just needs one more caffeine hit to power through. Just one more. Maybe two. Certainly, not more than three.

He shuffles into the darkened kitchen and shoves a mug under the coffee maker. A few button taps, and coffee starts dribbling into his cup, filling the room with its rich, bitter smell. Tony stares at the steady drip with what he has to admit is probably manic fixation. God, he loves coffee. He feels a prickle in his leg – must have been sitting for too long, getting pins and needles – and shakes it slightly.

The prickle doesn't go away. Also, pins and needles don't usually have mass and inertia when jiggled. Also also, they don't usually meow.

Tony looks down. A very tiny orange kitten is climbing his leg. Tony squints. He frowns. There is now another kitten climbing his other leg. A third is on approach. Tony squints a little harder, wondering if the sleep deprivation has finally caught up with him.

In what feels like no time at all, Tony finds himself being scaled by no less than five small, squeaking, needle-clawed felines. He is really struggling to process the situation.

He's still frozen in _ error: invalid input _ mode when Bucky Barnes comes slinking into the kitchen. Barnes is scanning the floor and making incredibly incongruous kissy noises, but when he sees Tony, he freezes too. More in terror than in confusion, Tony thinks, based on the bug-eyed expression he's suddenly wearing. 

“Barnes. Am I hallucinating, or am I actually being summited by a clutch of cat larvae?”

“I— I’m so sorry, Mr. Stark,” Barnes mumbles, “I didn’t— they got out, I’m sorry—” He rushes forward, hesitates when he realizes how close to Tony he is, then steels himself and begins to pluck kittens off Tony like burrs.

“‘Got out’?” Tony raises an eyebrow. “Refresh my memory, Snowflake. Did I or did I not institute a strict Tower rule against animals, fluffy and adorable or otherwise? I have a hard enough time keeping a pack of superheroes fed and watered. I don’t do pets.”

Barnes actually visibly flinches. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stark. The mother got hit by a car, and I— I was just going to foster them until— I’m sorry, I can take them to the shelter, they won’t be a problem for you.” His voice goes wobbly and rough on the last sentence, and Tony imagines him on hands and knees in filthy alleys, searching for hours under dumpsters and sewer grates for a litter of orphaned kittens. Christ.

Tony sighs as Barnes tugs the last kitten loose. “Okay, Red October, there’s three things I need you to do. One: never call me ‘Mister Stark’ again, it brings up way too many weird feelings that I definitely don’t want to deal with with you. Two: make an appointment with the vet, ASAP.” Barnes goes rigid, and clutches the the wriggling mass of fur closer to his chest. “Microchips, deworming, de-flea-ing, de-sexing, and whatever else it is you do with creatures born in New York City gutters. The whole nine yards. As soon as they’re old enough, get them scheduled.” 

Barnes relaxes, and Tony wonders what he’d expected him to say. Nothing good, obviously. What is involved in caring for newborn kittens, anyway? Can they drink from a bottle yet or do they have to be tube fed? How often? How much sleep has Barnes been getting? Fucking hell. Did the guy really think Tony was going to make him take the fuzzballs to get put down? Tony tries not to think too hard about what that says about him and forges ahead. 

“Three: no kittens in the lab. I don’t want to be responsible for accidentally disintegrating one of your furry brood. We clear?”

Barnes nods sharply. “Understood. Thank you— Tony. Thank you.” He ducks his head and shuffles back into the hallway, melting into the shadows. The fading sound of _ mew_ing marks his retreat. 

Once Barnes is gone, Tony retrieves his now-full mug and stares into it. “Did that really just happen?” he asks his coffee. The coffee does not answer. He sighs again, dumps it down the sink, and turns himself towards bed. Barnes with his kittens and his sad eyes is something he can’t deal with on two-and-a-half days of no sleep. Maybe this will make more sense after a fifteen hour nap. Probably not. 

Good grief. _ Kittens. _


	2. Kittens are terrible lab partners

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The kittens are definitely not ever allowed in the labs because Tony definitely does not like cats. Definitely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fulfills my S4: Dum-E square (card #3045) for the 2020 Tony Stark Bingo!

Bucky paces the floor of his suite. He’s looked _ everywhere _. He’d checked all his rooms twice times over, and all the common areas three times, and then Steve’s rooms, and Thor's rooms (currently unoccupied), and his own rooms again, just to be sure. He'd sent very calm and normal and circumspect texts to the remaining Avengers asking them to search their own rooms — no luck there either. 

He can’t ask JARVIS for help. The AI is always kind, but his ultimate loyalty lies with his creator. Bucky isn’t certain he can trust him not to inform Stark of the situation. 

Out of all the areas of the Avengers’ levels of the Tower that Bucky has access to, there’s only one place he hasn’t checked. He sets his jaw, takes a deep breath, and walks to the elevator. He hesitates for a moment. Then he presses the button for Stark’s lab. 

  
  


He’d hoped that Stark wouldn’t be in his lab, but, realistically, the chances of that had never been good. The genius spends very little time in his own rooms: if he’s not in the common areas, he’s generally in his workshop. Bucky knows that. But his stomach still drops when the elevator opens and he sees Stark leaning over one of his holographic worktables, engrossed in his equations. A moment later, Bucky also sees what he’d been looking for – and exactly what he’d feared. 

The orange tabby kitten is in the lab. The one place Stark had told him the kittens were absolutely _ not _ allowed. The robot that Stark calls “Dummy” has a bit of bright yellow cording pinched in its grabber claw, and Bucky watches in helpless horror as the bot jerks its arm up and down, wiggling the string in front of the kitten. And the little orange fucker _ loves _ it, leaping wildly at the makeshift toy like it’s got a sack of jumping beans in its belly. Bucky just about has a heart attack right there in the foyer. 

How has Stark not noticed? Bucky knows how lost he gets in his work, but not realizing that an entire damn animal has snuck into his lab and made friends with his robot is a whole other level of oblivious. It won’t last, that’s for sure. But Bucky doesn't have any idea how he can get in there and get the cat_ out _ without alerting Stark to the situation. Stuff the kitten in his shirt when Stark isn’t looking and run? Pull the fire alarm? Fake an Avengers alert? Punch through the wall? He isn’t actually sure how punching through the wall would lead to a solution, but it’s a very tempting outlet for his current level of stress.

He’s still standing outside the glass door, paralyzed by indecision, when the situation escalates beyond possible intervention. The kitten, suddenly bored with the string, gallops away from the bot and clambers its way up onto the holotable. 

_ Well, that’s it, then, _ Bucky thinks, and starts resigning himself for the inevitable trip to the nearest animal shelter. 

But Stark… doesn’t react. The kitten scrabbles and bounces across the holotable, chasing the floating figures and animations, treating a custom piece of scientific equipment that probably cost enough money to make Bucky nauseous like it’s the world’s most expensive cat toy. Stark mostly seems to be ignoring the kitten’s antics. Occasionally, he makes a superfluous gesture that sends something flying across the holodisplay, and if Bucky didn’t know better, he’d swear he was doing it just to entertain the cat. 

After a few minutes of cavorting, the kitten flops down on its side, stretches, and yawns. Stark doesn’t look at it, but he does reach down and absentmindedly scratches its chin. 

Bucky backs away slowly. He sidles back to the elevator, making sure to stay out of Stark’s line of sight, and silently presses the button to return to his suite. 

Well. Huh.


	3. IF YOU CAN DODGE A WRENCH, YOU CAN DODGE A BALL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can try to fool yourself, but everyone knows, as soon as the stray gets a name, it’s staying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve being furious about the Brooklyn Dodgers moving to Los Angeles is one of my favorite silly headcanons, and I’m totally tickled by the fact that Chris Evans’ dog’s name is Dodger. Of course I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to reference both of those things. 
> 
> This fulfills my S5: Warm and Fuzzy Feelings square (card #3045) for the 2020 Tony Stark Bingo!

Tony will never, ever admit it to another living soul, but he’s coming around to the idea that he was maybe, possibly, in retrospect, a little too harsh with the “no pets” rule.

He has to give Barnes credit: the guy is single-mindedly diligent and fastidious with every aspect of his kitten care. Tony has remained blissfully uninvolved in all the unpleasant realities of litter boxes, hairballs, and stinky cat food cans. He’d actually once caught the guy lint-rolling fur from under the couch in the middle of the night, and he’d had to tell JARVIS to tell Barnes to cool it and let the cleaning bots earn their keep. Anyway, the fact that literally nothing is being asked of him – beyond, like, not throwing the critters in a sack and drowning them in the bathtub – has made Tony slightly more amenable to having his life turned into a Daily Dodo video. It’s like when your friends have kids (he assumes; none of his friends actually have kids): you get all the amusement of watching adorable little gremlins run around, without the responsibility of cleaning up after them and keeping them alive. 

And, fine, okay. They _are_ adorable. The effect they have on a bunch of highly-trained, enhanced and/or otherwise lethal superheroes is unbelievable. Nat, he’d kind of expected, because she gives off the strongest “cat person” vibes of any human being he’s ever encountered. Bruce, sure: Bruce is already a big softie. The way he handles them so gently is so endearing Tony can barely stand it, but it’s not _surprising_ or anything. But now Clint has expanded his expertise in "making objects fly very fast and accurately through the air" to include catnip mice and crinkle balls, and seems to take it just as seriously. Sam has a very embarrassing propensity towards baby talk. Thor spoils the kittens rotten with table scraps (apparently on the mistaken conclusion that it will make them grow into "magnificent beasts"), and Steve turns into a useless pile of besotted goo any time Barnes walks into the room holding a fuzzball. (Though that last one might have more to do with Barnes than the kittens; jury's still out on that one.) And Rhodey and Pepper, who are both horrible traitors, are encouraging everything, because they seem to think that Tony is a scrooge who needs a bunch of furry creatures to invade his life and soften his cold, mechanical heart.

So, yeah, the long and short of it is, everyone loves the kittens, and Tony doesn’t have any justifiable grounds to get rid of them. He briefly holds out hope that Barnes will stick to his promise to adopt them out once they’re old enough, but then they start getting _names_, and Tony knows it’s a lost cause.

The two grey kittens attach themselves to Bruce and Natasha, who name them Priya and Polina, respectively, because neither of them cares about being extremely predictable. Clint lays claim to the white and orange-splotched one, which is ignobly christened “Pizza Bagel.” (Tony is a genius, but he swears, he has no idea what’s going through that man’s head sometimes.) The white kitten takes a liking to Barnes. He pretends to be aloof when Tony’s around and just calls it “кошка,” but Tony knows better. He’s caught Barnes cuddling it a couple times and heard him call it Alpine. 

The orange tabby has not yet received a name. The unspoken consensus has been that whoever bonds with a kitten names it, which is putting Tony in a bit of an awkward position. For reasons that are certainly unfathomable to Tony, the orange tabby has decided that her favorite person in the Tower is _him._ Unlike dogs, who understand their place in the evolutionary hierarchy, cats seem to select their favorite human with very little regard for how the human feels about it. Cats are terrible. 

Under the burden of unspoken peer pressure, he’d initially suggested naming her Pepper, because they’re both spunky redheads. Pepper had kindly and lovingly informed him that under no circumstances was it socially appropriate to name a pet animal after your girlfriend, or to call your girlfriend-slash-boss “spunky.” That had exhausted the entirety of Tony’s inspiration, so now he’s settled into a cold war of Chicken with the rest of the team. If he pretends to be oblivious for long enough, eventually someone else will name the kitten something. Right?

  
  


* * *

  
  


Tony likes to hang out in the common areas whenever Pepper assigns him boring corporate homework, because if he gets distracted he can always use the excuse that Natasha threatened him with a knife to get him to play Mario Kart with her, or Thor set the toaster on fire again. Living with a pack of rambunctiously destructive superheroes does have its perks. 

Today, the living room is relatively quiet. Nat is slaughtering Barnes in some kind of board game that Tony doesn’t recognize, Clint is playing with the orange kitten, and Tony is looking at the wall of text on his tablet and trying to remember how the fuck he ever had the patience to do this all the time before he made Pepper CEO. Steve wanders in with an empty coffee mug, and immediately takes a catnip beanbag to the face. Orange Fuzzbutt goes streaking across the room and snags the toy, tumbling hilariously over Steve’s feet while Steve makes an equally hilarious cross-eyed expression of surprise. 

“Hey— watch it, Barton, come on.” He looks genuinely peeved, which probably means he’s in a bad mood, and Tony smirks to himself. Tony and Steve get along much better than they did at the start, but Steve’s Grumpy Mode still makes Tony feel a little thrill of perverse amusement. So sue him. It’s not his fault the good Captain is so fun to rile up. 

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Clint says, flinging another toy at the cat, who ignores it in favor of trying to disembowel the beanbag. “Where are those superhuman reflexes, huh? If you can dodge a bullet, you can dodge a catnip ball.”

Tony gives Barton a scathing look for daring to sully his home with such a lowbrow movie reference. Though, really, Tony probably shouldn’t have expected any better from the grown adult man who named his cat “Pizza Bagel.” 

“I can’t dodge bullets?” Steve says, looking at Clint with a mix of annoyance and confusion.

Barnes pipes up with, “You can’t dodge anything. The United States Military literally armed you with a shield because you have some kinda pathological aversion to avoiding projectiles.” Steve’s grump gets grumpier, and Tony’s smirk widens. Despite Barnes’ past habit of brainwashed murdering and his present habit of bringing stray animals into Tony’s house, both of which ought to put him in the “terrible roommate” category automatically, the guy does have his moments. 

“There’s nothing wrong with my dodging,” Steve grumbles, a denial that Tony thinks comes less from conviction and more from his compulsive need to be stubborn and contrary. “I can dodge stuff just fine.”

“Yes,” Clint says gravely. “You are so awesome at dodging. You are the best dodger ever.” 

At the veiled reference to his former favorite baseball team – also known as his number one trigger word – Steve’s mood sours further. “_Don’t_,” Steve says, waving his coffee mug threateningly at Clint. “Don’t even start.” And he stomps over to the kitchen to re-caffeinate himself. 

And Tony has a wonderful, awful, devious idea. 

“Well, you may be right about our illustrious Captain, but at least one of us here isn’t acrobatically impaired,” he says, unable to stop the wicked grin from spreading across his face. “That’s you, Fuzzface.” He picks up the stick toy that has a string and a feather attached to one end and teases the kitten with it. As if to prove his point, she goes for it like she’s got a rocket installed in her butt, and snags the feather with an impressive airborne twist. “Now that you mention it, that’s not a bad name for an animal.” He wiggles the feather again, and leans down to scratch the kitten’s round, fuzzy belly. “How about it, hm? What do you say, Dodger?”

Bucky cackles (an expression of mirth that Tony’s pretty sure he has never heard from the man before), and in the kitchen, Steve lets out a outraged exclamation that could best be described as a strangled honk. Tony resolves to get the recording from JARVIS later and make it Steve’s text notification tone, and decides that this is, without a doubt, the best idea he’s ever had. 

He’s so glad he got to name one of the cats. Cats are awesome.


End file.
